Basecamp Orphaned Track Segments

Former Member over 5 years ago

Comment: Hi first some background. A couple of years back many of my Garmin Basecamp tracks were myseriously truncated thereby losing the timestamp & elevation data but keeping the segment ID and co-ordinates. I have been desperately trying to find a way to restore the original Basecamp track segments but no matter what I try the files always appear truncated.

I previously used some data recovery software which found many of the Garmin track segments but on their own they are useless without the corresponding Basecamp Alldata.gdb file. Is there a way to include these "Orphan" track segments into a new version of Basecamp?

I hope you can provide me with some advice / pointers. Thank you

David J Parker

0 daknudsen over 5 years ago

I wish you luck and will be following to see if you can get any satisfaction. I experienced exactly the same and had I known then what I know now, I could possibly have avoided some of the loss. Long story short, I transferred data from BaseCamp to HomePort a few years back because BaseCamp could not read the LakeVU marine chart chip that I was given free as compensation when Garmin "support" mistakenly prompted me to delete critical files on my Upper Midwest Fishing Guide chip. A few years later, it became apparent that HomePort would never support my move to a 64-bit MacOS, so I got a replacement UMFG chip on eBay and transferred my data back to BaseCamp.

The "what I know now" part: During one of BaseCamp's version upgrades and/or during the transfer of my data from BaseCamp to HomePort was when my tracks were stripped of their timestamp and elevation data. So, when I moved things back to BaseCamp, I copied my tracks from HomePort to my connected 64st handheld and then from the 64st to BaseCamp. After all of the tracks were transferred, I upgraded to my iMac to Catalina (64-bit MacOS). This preserved the timestamps and elevations. Unfortunately, it did not bring back the full data in previously stripped tracks.

I feel like much of the loss was totally Garmin's fault due to the stripping of data that occurred during one or another BaseCamp app upgrade. The only way to prevent that might have been to perform a complete backup of tracks to a handheld or do some other archiving of the .gpx files, but that's not something the average user thinks would possibly be necessary, nor would they want to take the time to do it. Water under the bridge at this point, but it makes me leery of future version upgrades.

I have searched on my HD as far back as 2008 for old .gpx files, and occasionally try importing them into my new version of BaseCamp. No timestamps or elevation. I have gone back, using Time Machine. No luck there, either.

Best of luck to you.